Going through J. K. Rowling’s statements about transgender people

Andrew James Carter goes through J. K. Rowling’s defense of her own tweets about transgender people. 

He does some serious debunking here, explaining where Rowling goes astray.

This is a long text. But it is definitely worth reading. It can also serve as a repository for arguments to be used in debates with trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and other transphobes.

//Since JK Rowling has blocked any reply to this litany of half-truths and transphobic dogwhistles, I thought I’d catalogue them properly here:

Maya Forstater

1a. In the case of Maya Forstater. Firstly, she did not “lose her job” (she was a contract worker, her contract was not renewed). The distinction is important both legally and linguistically - since “losing a job” casts Forstater as the victim, implying she was fired.

1b. Forstater also did not “ask the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected by law”. She asked the judge to rule that (among other things) misgendering was protected speech. This was the judge’s response.

1c. And here’s the full judgement, for those wanting to know more. I’ll also note that not once in JK’s blog post does she reference an external source to support her views. She alludes to them, but never links.

1d. The distinction between the truth and JK’s mischaracterisation is important - because *no one* is arguing that sex is not determined by biology. This is a common transphobic attack to cast trans (and NB/intersex) rights in an absolutist light to make them seem absurd.

Setting herself up as an authority

2a. JK lists all the sources from which her view of trans rights has been informed. What’s important here is that she’s setting herself up as an authority - and so has *zero* defence for why she’s so woefully uninformed on this issue, or why her views are so painfully one-sided.

2b. Note also that Rowling declares her “fictional female detective” as being “of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues”. Surely if this is an issue facing all cis women, age doesn’t factor into it?

2c. And - since trans rights don’t actually impinge women’s rights at all - neither the character nor Rowling is materially affected by the issue. The majority of women have no issue with trans women (or trans people in general, though JK is addressing trans women in this post).

She is the victim?

3a. While any threats made against Rowling are deplorable - that would never justify a transphobic response. The narrative JK is building here is one where she is the victim - not the trans community who are oppressed and marginalised every day.

Keep reading

The real roots of TERF ideology

Over at twitter people are discussing a transphobic TERF twitter post from 2018.  Trigger warning: It is extremely bigoted and it contains explicit language. 

I am going to write about it anyway, because it so clearly documents what kind of tradition the trans-exclusionary radical feminists belong to.

To those of you who think that the current UK debate on trans people is about freedom of speech and “good people on both sides”, this is your wake-up call. 

Here’s the drill used by racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes all over the world:

1. Stick to stereotypes. 

This is  the “All Jews are greedy and have big noses” strategy.

The South African racists developed the pencil test. Put a pencil in someone’s hair. If it falls out, the person is white and can use the bathrooms of white people. If it stays, the person is black and unwanted.

According to many TERFs all trans women look like men. (And if they don’t, they are reinforcing the sexist stereotypes of the Patriarchy. Damned if you do…)

The fact that many cis women have masculine traits is ignored. The fact that masculine cis women are thrown out of women’s bathrooms for being men is apparently a price the TERFs are willing to pay.

2. If someone belongs to an unwanted category, anything bad anyone in that category does applies to all members of that category.

If a black man commits a crime, all black men are criminals. If a white man commits a crime, he is a criminal, mad, or in any case some kind of exception to the general rule of white male goodness.

In the same vein: If a gay man seduces a minor, all gay men are pedophiles. If a straight man sexually abuses a minor, he is mentally ill.

The TERF approach to trans women is simple: They are all men, and all men are rapists.

Here’s the post:

Dr. Emmy Zje has made some very relevant comments to this text over at twitter.

She adds that: 

//Some women: 

• are tall 
• have a deep voice 
• have facial hair 
• have broad shoulders & big muscles 
• cannot get pregnant 
• don’t have a uterus or period 
• match nary a single fem stereotype 
• have xy chromosomes 

 Yep. Cis women are diverse as heck! Oh Right! Trans women too!

Proclaiming “BIOLOGY!” to invalidate trans women invalidates you to anyone with the wherewithal to actually attempt a basic understanding of trans women. Trans people in general arise because of the complex biological interface we interact with physical reality through.

Trans women are adult human females. Sometimes in nature and biology, bodies don’t match the evolutionary human template honed over hundreds of thousands of years. Being trans is merely one of the MANY ways. We are stardust, yes. Some stardust is trans stardust.//

What is truly amazing here, is that the author of the original tumblr post feels the need to create such a check list in the first place. You see, the traditional TERF approach to cis/trans lesbian relationships is that lesbian women are not attracted to lesbian trans women, because lesbian trans women are, according to them, straight men. They will know right away that the person they meet is trans.

But think about it, if they need to see the anus hair of a woman to determine if she is acceptable, they have already felt a strong sexual attraction to that woman. They have read that person as female and reacted to that person as if she is a woman. In other words: She is indistinguishable from other women they are attracted to.  This means that the very existence of this trans woman falsifies the idea that lists like this one can be used to invalidate trans women.

So we are back to the racist research of the 1930s, when bigots measured sculls and noses to determined what people should be allowed into good society and who should be sent to  labor camps.

Here’s another to the point tweet from Lene Love:

The TERF/Right Wing Alliance is now out in the open

Not all conservatives are transphobic, homophobic or sexist – far from it – but most right wing extremists are. They long term plan is to force all LGBTQA people back into the closet, branded as sinners and perverts. And yes, most of them want a world where white men rule.

So in what world would it make sense for lesbian feminists to collaborate with such people in order to eradicate another marginalized group?

In this world, apparently. The Washington Post has an interesting article mapping the current collaboration between trans-exclusive radical feminists (TERFs) and right wing traditionalists. 

Samantha Schmidt writes:

The Women’s Liberation Front is part of a long-running strain of feminism that rejects the existence of transgender identity. These fringe activists argue that advancements in transgender rights will come at the expense of women’s rights and threaten the safety and sanctity of women-only spaces. They say women are defined not by their gender identity, but by their biology and by having “survived girlhood.”

Mainstream progressives have long shunned the organization, calling it a discriminatory, right-wing group disguised as feminist. But the Women’s Liberation Front, also known as WoLF, has found an increasingly influential platform by teaming up with conservatives who disagree with their support of abortion rights and the “reproductive sovereignty” of women.

WoLF’s leaders have become frequent guests on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and at Heritage Foundation events. The group received a $15,000 grant from the Alliance Defending Freedom to help fund a legal fight against the Obama administration over transgender bathroom policies. It also filed an amicus brief in one of the most consequential Supreme Court cases of the year, arguing that sex-based discrimination protections in the workplace should not apply to transgender people.

Now, WoLF is even helping shape legislation in places like South Dakota, which last month became the first state to advance a wave of state bills nationwide banning medical interventions for transgender youth. Kara Dansky, a WoLF board member from the District, plans to travel to South Dakota on Monday to testify in favor of the bill in a Senate committee hearing.

Emboldened by the Trump administration and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Republican politicians across the country have made transgender issues, particularly those affecting transgender children, a key target for 2020. And Chart and other radical feminists are helping to bolster their message, creating the perception of bipartisan support in a polarizing social debate.

Trump and the Republican radical extremists (they are not really Conservatives, as I see them) are using the traditional playbook for creating fear and mobilizing their troops. You find a scapegoat (Jews, black people, liberated women, gay men etc.etc.) and then create panic by presenting them as a threat to the common sense world order. 

Some people love simplistic explanations for what goes wrong. Such explanations give them a sense of meaning and control, and – above all– they give them permission to hate.

These days Republicans are using transgender kids and their caretakers as the big threat needed to keep their tribe in power. An endless stream of lies is produced to legitimize this hatred.

WoLF is helping the Republicans keeping Donald Trump in power, and because of this they are also helping his regime appoint more homophobic judges, creating more anti-LGBTQA laws and regulations, and protect men who have used and abused women. 

On the positive side: We all see their true face now.

Photo: Kara Dansky, a WoLF board member, speaks during an event at the Seattle Public Library on Feb. 1. (Lindsey Wasson for The Washington Post)

10 ways of handling transphobic feminists online

Internet rule #1 is “Never engage with trolls!” They are not out to debate you. They are there to defeat you and make you feel miserable. That being said, how do we stop transphobic “radical feminists” from harming transgender people?

One of the most active transphobic activists out there are the TERFs or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. They may prefer terms like “gender critical” and “trans-critical”, but those are only names they have come up with to disguise the fact that they are transphobes – you know, in the same way some racists call themselves “race realists”.

There is not nothing realistic about “race realists” and there is nothing critical about the “gender critical”. Both groups try to carpet bomb decent people into submission by presenting an endless number of “facts” cherry picked from extremist web sites. 

For them this is not about learning. 

Still, sometimes we have to engage them, not because we can change their minds, but because they  are trying to change the minds of other people. Since they are appealing to common prejudices, they sometimes succeed, as is shown by their success in countries like Britain and Sweden. 

Sometimes trans people have to engage them in order to make others see  them for who they truly are.

Here are some tips on how to handle transphobic TERFs online:

1. Only engage TERFs and other transphobes if other people are listening in. You are not there to make the TERF change her mind. You are there to make other people see your side of the story.
   
   
2. Do not behave like them. Be calm and composed and reply in a polite and clear headed manner.
   
   
3. Feel free to point out their bad behavior to the others though, again in a factual and calm manner, as in “I do not thinks slurs like that one help us get closer to the facts” or “If you do not have the facts to back up your argument, that’s OK, but name calling is not a good replacement for proper science or real life experience.”
   
   
4. Meet pseudo-science and fake news with real facts. Most of them have not done their home work and it is most often easy to google reliable sources in order to find out what the argument is really about. Do not engage them in this way unless you have read up on transgender issues, though. If they move on to another fake fact after you have debunked one of their myths, call them out for doing so before addressing the next lie. 
   
   
5. Call them out on their collaboration with religious extremists and  right wing fanatics. 
   
   
6. Refer to the fundamental feminist principle that you do not set marginalized groups up against each other and that real feminism is about intersectionality, solidarity and compassion.
   
   
7. Point out that their arguments against trans people (“sexual predators”, “bath rooms,” “confused and misled” etc.) are exactly the same arguments that were once used to keep people of color down and gay and lesbian people in the closet. 
   
   
8. Communicate clearly that the trans community is a diverse group of people, where we do not necessarily agree on everything. There is no “transgender ideology” or “trans cult”.
   
   
9. Point out that high suicide rates among trans people are caused by invalidation and bullying. To invalidate your own transgender child is child abuse.
   
   
10. Bring other trans friends into the discussion

Do not engage TERFs if you are emotionally vulnerable, at least not on your own. I have met a few TERF sociopaths who thrive on exploiting such vulnerabilities. If you feel that you are facing one of that category, disengage and move on. Most often their  tactics will be seen and understood by other participants in such discussions. That is: These TERFs hurt their own cause by behaving in such a manner.

If they come back to you, trying to bait you into new discussions, it is OK to block them. You have the power to say no. You are in control. Never forget that.

 More about the trans-exclusionary radical feminists and their tactics  here!

Here is a list of selected posts on TERFs from Trans Express.

Illustration photo: gorodenkoff

WPATH shoots down “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria!

The international organization for transgender health, WPATH, just shot down the use of the term “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”.

As they point out, ROGD is not a medical entity recognized by any major professional association:

“it is both premature and inappropriate to employ official-sounding labels that lead clinicians, community members, and scientist to form absolute conclusions about adolescent gender identity development and the factors that may potentially influence the timing of an adolescent’s declaration as a different gender from birth-assigned sex.”

The term is actively used by TERFs and transphobic right wing extremists to invalidate the identity of young transgender people. 

More about “rapid onset gender dysphoria” here.

Transgender bathroom segregation? We have been there before.

crossdreamers:

You know all those anti-transgender bathroom bills, where their supporters will force trans people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender, while expressing concern for women and children? We have been there before. 

What history tells us is that people who hate use segregation in public places to harass, humiliate and control those they consider inferior. 

This is not about protecting women and children. This is about protecting an oppressive way of life.

Here are some pictures from the segregated American South and Apartheid South Africa. Do you see the difference between what the haters did then and what they do now?

Exactly! Trans women and trans men do not even get their own segregated restrooms. They are to stay at home, in their closets.

Anyone who supports the anti-trans bathroom bills are committing a crime against humanity, in the same way the racist of the southern states and South Africa did when these posters were put up.

Bathroom Bills & The Dialectic of Oppression

A follow up on this one. The Transadvocate has a very interesting article on the similarities between right wing extremist persecution of people of color, gay and lesbians and transgender persons.

Cristan Williams writes:

When one considers the political discourse of dominate-subordinate group integration, one cannot ignore the ways in which the bathroom is dialectically constructed as the symbol of integration.  

For instance, the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan (KKK) activist, U.S. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo said that the most disgusting thing about life in Washington, DC was “to see nice sweet girls from North Dakota being forced to use the same stools and toilets used by the Negroes who come from the slums of Washington, a large percentage of them affected by Negro diseases.”. 

In 1964, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee reported that, “Many homosexuals… take their sex where they find it, be it in a rest room of a park or other public place” and that “Homosexuality is, as a total picture, a dread disease.” 

In a more contemporary time, similar rhetoric was deployed against the ratification of the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. A 1980s-era political pamphlet titled The ERA-GAY-AIDS CONNECTION asserted that the ERA would allow gay people to, “use public restrooms and parks to solicit sex with strangers”. The pamphlet went on to suggest that “If the E.R.A. puts ‘sex equality’ into the Constitution, we are asked: Would police, paramedics, dentists, health personnel and morticians be permitted to take adequate precautions to defend themselves against AIDS and other homosexual diseases?” 

Almost a decade before the publication of The ERA-GAY-AIDS CONNECTION pamphlet, the public was warned that should the ERA become ratified, men would be able to use the women’s restroom and gym locker rooms and that women would lose their privacy in public accommodations.”

Such political arguments are common among those who support discrimination against transgender people. A political radio advertisement used to defeat the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) asserted that protecting transgender women in public accommodations was “filthy, disgusting and unsafe”.

Racism, homophobia and transphobia have the same roots: A fear of  loss of privilege and loss of power.

Dr. Gillian Frank, interviewed by Williams, puts it this way:

Stigmatizing people by labeling them as sexually dangerous is a practice that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. In the United States, marginalized and despised groups were regularly depicted as sexual threats. 

Communists, gays and lesbians, African Americans, Mexicans all were stigmatized in this way.Whites resisting Reconstruction in the southern United States deployed a powerful trope that black men were sexually predacious. They did so in order to rationalize controlling and marginalizing newly freed and enfranchised African American men. The idea that black men were rapists who desired white women undergirded lynching, which was a form of domestic terrorism used to control and disempower the African American population.

By the time we got to the Civil Rights era, the argument was this: if we get rid of Jim Crow laws and allow blacks to use the same public facilities as whites, miscegenation will take place. “Their” boys will want to marry “our” daughters. “Their” boys will want to have sex with “our” daughters. “Their” boys will want to rape “our” daughters.

More here!

(via crossdreamers)

Less than half of America’s youth are straight, new survey finds

Yet another study confirms the trend: Younger people are less and less likely to think of themselves as exclusively heterosexual or – for that matter – belonging to one of the poles of the gender binary only.

The survey, of Americans aged 13-20 (Generation Z), has found that only 48% of them identify as “exclusively heterosexual”.

It turns out sexual orientation and gender identity are more like continuums, after all. Or maybe something even more complex.

Pink New writes:

In comparison with millennials aged 21 to 34, the younger generation – known as Gen Z – were found to be more open-minded and permissive than the group just a few years older…

Using a scale of zero to six, where zero represented “exclusively heterosexual” and six “exclusively homosexual”, over a third of Gen Z respondents picked a number other than zero or six.

The youngest ones are also strongly transpositive:

Over 70% of 13 to 20-year-olds strongly agreed that public spaces should be required to provide gender neutral bathrooms, which compared to only a little over half of millennials.

In another article about the study,  Teens These Days Are Queer AF, Vice adds this about gender:

Fifty-six percent of 13-to-20-year-olds said that they knew someone who went by gender neutral pronouns such as “they,” “them,” or “ze,” compared to 43 percent of people aged 28 to 34 years old. Over a third of Gen Z respondents also strongly agreed that gender did not define a person as much as it used to. This figure dropped to 23 percent among millennials who were 28 and up.

Last year another study found that 43% of Brits aged 18 to 24 years old were bisexual.

That study clearly documented that the younger you get, the less likely you are to consider yourself purely heterosexual.

Illustration photo from Jupiterimages.

You need dysphoria to be trans

ilymlt:

 You need dysphoria to be trans. You need dysphoria to be trans. You need dysphoria to be trans. 

I cannot stress this enough.

You don’t like stereotypical boy/girl things? Cool, congratulations. You’re still not trans. You want to wear boy/girl clothes? Cool, you’re still not trans.

Checklist for being trans:

[  ] Dysphoria with the sex you are born with

Jesus Christ. Being trans isn’t just a game of dress up. 

No, you do not need dysphoria to be trans

Trans and transgender are umbrella terms that cover a wide variety of gender variance, and have been so since the early 1990s.

And yes, this is the way it is understood by the medical establishment as well. Since “truscum” and “transmedicalists” belive so strongly in medical authorities, I will give you a few definitions of the term, as it is used by doctors, researchers and health personell right now:

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, WPATH
“[Transgender:] Adjective to describe a diverse group of individuals who cross or transcend culturally defined categories of gender. The gender identity of transgender people differs to varying degrees from the sex they were assigned at birth”

The American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5 definition)
“Transgender refers to the broad specter of individuals who transiently or persistently identify with a gender different from their natal gender.”  

(In the DSM5 the terms “transgender”, “transsexual” and “gender dysphoric”  are not synonymous. Some, but not all, transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria.)

American Psychological Association
"Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.”

American Medical Student Association
“'Transgender’ is an umbrella term used by people in a number of different groups, including but not limited to cross-dressers (those who wear clothing of the other sex some of the time) to genderqueer people (those who feel that they belong to either both genders or neither gender) and transsexuals (an older term for people who take hormones and have sex-reassignment surgery (SRS) in order to transition to a different sex.“

The UK National Health Service (NHS)
"Trans and transgender are terms that are used to describe people who don’t conform to the traditional division of male and female.Trans embraces many different types of people and lifestyles, including:

• People who cross-dress (transvestite people). These people sometimes wear the clothing of the opposite sex, but don’t want to live full-time as a member of the opposite sex.
• People who feel that they’re both male and female, or neither male nor female.
• Drag queens, drag kings and other people who don’t appear conventionally masculine or feminine.
• Transsexual people. These are people who have a strong and constant desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex. Many transsexual people have gender reassignment treatment to make their appearance more consistent with their preferred gender. This often involves hormone therapy and surgery.”

(Click here for more definitions!)

None of these definitions require gender dysphoria. There are definitions of the word transsexual that require dysphoria, but this does not apply to the broader terms trans or transgender.

Arguing that trans people who do not experience gender dysphoria is playing a “game of dress up” is extremely disrespectful.

References here, here and here. See also: What the DSM-5 says about terms like transgender, transsexual and gender dysphoria, and Why we need a broad interpretation of transgender.

(And just to make this clear: This post is written by one who does suffer from gender dysphoria, and who wants to give room for all gender variant people to explore their sense of self.)